I saw Hereditary a couple days ago and, for reasons that I’ll hopefully explain in a little bit, it got me thinking about Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, a movie I think about a lot even though it usually just makes me mad.
One of the things I respect about Baker, though in kind of a smart-assed ironic way, is his bone-deep Victorian sensibility for storytelling. It’s dressed up, and usually received, as a kind of beneficent humanism, but I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that Baker wants to have his cake and eat it too. Like the “woke freak show” double-dealing of The Greatest Showman, Baker draws eyeballs with promises of oddballs and outcasts while assuring his customers that their willingness to consume his product is evidence of their magnanimous souls indeed.
The Florida Project, in particular, has always come off to me like something that could have been made–practically identically–as a 20s silent film starring Lillian Gish as a teary eyed “fallen woman” looking after her precocious moppet in a ramshackle lower east side boarding house. And it’s not like our A Project of Florida out of time remake would have to dial back the subject matter–The Florida Project soft pedals and implies the sex work just as much as any pre-code movie. At least the poverty-porn ala Von Stroheim would have given us an actual narrative resolution instead of the bathetic fantasia cop-out we got.
But what really gets me about Baker is his incipient Victorian belief in beauty and morality that seems to crop up in both Tangerine and The Florida Project. Baker’s movies, as we are so constantly reminded, are all about the deviant, the outcast, the fringe character. But despite the gesture of inclusiveness Baker is committed to a circumscribed border around “acceptable” freakishness and sorting out all the bad freaks from the good ones. It’s a distinction he usually expresses through the physical attributes of his actors.
Take a look at the scene from The Florida Project where Willem Dafoe scares off the most obvious movie pedophile at all time. Now this is one fucked up looking guy! Bald, hunchbacked, pot-bellied, creepy stuttering voice. I’m sure the actor’s a perfectly fine, sexually normal, guy, but Jesus Christ it’s like lurking around playgrounds in Central Florida was his destiny from the moment he came out of the womb. It’s such a bizarrely old-fashioned way of depicting a menacing deviant, especially since I have the (maybe unsupported) impression that there’s been a cultural shift about this kind of thing and we’ve shifted to depicting the most dangerous people superficially harmless and ingratiating. But Sean Baker’s still out here, I guess, telling us that moral sickness is incarnated physically through a twisted and grotesque appearance, an idea which might actually be pre-Victorian.
My favorite scene in Tangerine does the same thing, only a little less so. When Sin-Dee goes looking for Dinah and has to pull her (violently) out of a nightmarish motel room, Baker gives us a pretty alarming look at another side of the LA sex work scene. In contrast to the careful attention Sin-dee and Alexandra give their bodies, this den of filth is run by an obese white women and some kind of shrunken, vaguely goblinoid bald man we first see smoking crack when Sin-dee kicks the door down. People are just fucking everywhere in this disgusting hovel, and when Sin-dee finds Dinah it’s in a bathroom where two obese men are being fellated. I’m sparing you the screencaps.
I would be disingenuous to pretend that Sin-dee and Alexandra, trans women, have culturally sanctioned, conforming bodies themselves, but I think Baker’s working in a kind of sly delineation here. Sin-dee and Alexandra are garish, sure, but they have pride in their appearance, they have style, they have an aesthetic tied to their identity (an idea reinforced in the movie’s final moments). The motel-dwellers, on the other hand, are just trash–hugely obese or bizarrely ectomorphic, uncomfortably pale, wearing ratty tank-tops and shorts if they’re wearing any clothes at all. They have no pride, they have no style, don’t they disgust you? Even the way they do their business is coded as repellent. Sin-dee and Alexandra work on LA’s sunny street corners and in cars. It’s not private and it’s not convenient, but it’s vaguely legitimizing: it shows they have nothing to hide. Meanwhile, these bastards hide away in a darkened motel room, practically going subterranean to do their dirty deeds.
I don’t think Baker is crossing some moral line here, I just think this tendency belies how shallow his thinking and project are generally. But I’m given pause by how Ari Aster uses Milly Shapiro in Hereditary, which is a director using a child with a certain facial character to reinforce that the child is disturbed and creepy. Let alone because that child is the earthly vessel of the literal devil himself. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when we evaluate directors we examine the laziness that is translating their revulsion with a person’s appearance into the moral evaluation of that person’s character in the drama. It takes an artistic tool away from a director, I recognize that. But when the tool is “force the audience to look at a gross person to make them understand that they should not like them,” I can’t muster up a lot of sympathy.
That scene in the motel room in Tangerine is still my favorite in the movie, maybe the only one in the movie I fully like, because it’s so unexpected and so honest. Baker sends an unguarded message, blessedly free from the sophomoric they’re-gross-but-they’re-beautiful paradox he seems enraptured by. “See these guys” he says, “now these guys are really fucked up.”
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